The present on-line dating and social networking services are online dominated and do not easily tie in to a user's day to day interaction with the real world. In many known systems the users spend their time broadcasting and sifting through a myriad of online social protocols, using intelligent devices, rather than spending valuable time encountering friends, relatives or business contacts in person.
A standardization body technically involved with the issue of providing contact between end user of handheld or other intelligent devices is the 3GPP working on a specification on “Proximity based Services” (ProSe) in TS23.303 (Rel-12), TR 33.833 and TS 33.303. The 3GPP specification for this ProSe discovery is based on the E-UTRA radio interface and the use of ProSe Application Codes bound to globally unique ProSe Application IDs in the mobile network operator's Core Network. The ProSe service is a mobile operator focused service and only works between users of different operators, if this pair of operators has a service contract for this service and both provide the technical interfaces.
The security threats identified in the ProSe communication includes at least forged or replayed messages and eavesdropping on the contents of the messages, apart from computer viruses etc. that may infect the devices through software installations and malicious messages.
From the US Patent Application Publication No. 20130276140 is known a system for electronically aided exchange of information between social and business contacts using controlled access technologies with tokens of authentication to control access to protected information in a contact's profile. Authentication tokens are used provide relatively quick access to secured data and other resources in a service provider's system, providing credentials (e.g., username and password) for tokens to be preloaded to client's device. A digital transaction token may be configured to provide proof of the client's authorization for a social or business contact or to a business premise, such as an event organizer, club house, and/or hospital, to access the corresponding client's profile.
A transaction token may be embedded in a profile page code provided in a profile response. When a profile page code is received and loaded by the browser application, the transaction token is loaded by the browser as well. Thus, the transaction token may be maintained in the code of the profile page rather than be delivered separately. Thus a sender's and receiver's wireless devices may exchange transaction tokens in a local wireless protocol, and the wireless devices are coupled together over a second wireless network. The devices may communicate with a server via cable or other physical connection to a PC, or through any form of wireless connection, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or WLAN (802.11), which may relay the tokens or other information either directly or through some intermediary (e.g., a cellular network) to the server. The remaining problem still being that a unique identifier (ID) is needed, which may be based on the mobile device, the name, address, billing information (if applicable), username, profile information, photo, preferences and names of friends.
If two devices want to initiate and conduct direct communication with technology available in prior art, there are at least the following issues:                a device or other identity information is broadcasted which allows user tracking,        the broadcast is done via a network operator, which need to support this somehow,        broad support from operating systems is required,        global approaches to establish a proximity security association usually would require a global Public Key Infrastructure for user authentication, which is quite expensive. Alternatively, it could be shared key based, but due to the number of combinations, there would be a very, very large number of symmetric keys.        
The identifications provided may be, apart from any device ID information, network id's like the SSID identity for WLAN, Bluetooth Identity, or a social network authentication system like the Facebook Single Sign On.
There is thus a need for a globally working system to set up a secure local communication, but while preserving the integrity and location privacy of the users by not broadcasting the device identity. This means in practice that a solution must be found that is not built around geographically local and competing operators.